The rationale behind this mod is to make SRB2's gameplay deeper and more interesting without compromising its essence.

This quick new version was required to fix a gamebreaking bug, but also has a few other changes while we're at it. Hopefully I didn't break anything else.
Also because this forum doesn't seem to like really long posts, all changelogs previous to this one are now in the attachments. You can read the major changes from previous versions in the spoiler tags below, and read the full patch notes from the attachment.

New things in PLUS3:

Enforced 5 second respawn time in shooter modes

No more Knuckles fire rate buff

Bug fixes

Spoiler: Changes from SRB2 PLUS2 to SRB2 PLUS3

SHOOTER MODES

Enforce five second respawn on death, time remaining visible on the HUD

CHARACTER BALANCE

Knuckles' NORMALSPEED reduced from 36 to 35

Knuckles' improved ring weapon fire rate removed

BUG FIXES

Fixed a crash bug involving the new knockback calculations and flame jets

All weapon rings now have some form of distance based knockback, get closer to make opponents fly farther

You and your team get full kill credit for hitting an opponent who then suicides or dies by environment hazard within a short time

Emeralds and weapon panels only drop on death

Bug fixes

Spoiler: PLUS1 Major Changes

Changes to ring loss and post hit flashing mechanics so that there are more shades of difficulty between "I have two rings and death pits are the only thing that can kill me" and "I have zero rings and everything kills me".

Changes to shooter modes to focus on pressing the attack and following up on first hits to score kills.

I like the idea of ringloss being more difficult out of everything. Reminds me of the modern system where rings fly farther and farther after consecutive hits, so you can't just run around all willy nilly skipping crucial hazards with a single ring over and over. I'll definately give this a shot when I can.

Overall, this seems to take all the issues I see with vanilla's match and accentuate them even more to the point where it is far more frustrating to play.

Firstly, it gives Sonic and other characters with high speed AND acceleration even more of a buff in that they can chase down players easier to hit them, get away easier after being hit, and evade easier to repeatedly hit. Since you're actually required to chase down and kill players now, it just makes it all the more blatant. This makes Sonic even more of the go to choice for match than he was before, since characters like Tails have no hope in getting away.

Respawning is made worse by the fact that if you respawn in the middle of a bunch of players, you're no worse off standing there and waiting to be killed. Rings in these areas are few and far between and actually getting to them is likely to have you killed first anyway since you have a reduced mercy invincibility timer with less rings.

With the changes to the damage system, you actually made rail more powerful by being less powerful, go figure. You can more easily hit people again after hitting them once with a rail because they're moving slower. Same would go for other projectiles to an extent too I suppose. At the very least getting your rings back as Tails isn't going to happen much either way.

The altered damage system you have here I do think could work nicely in singleplayer. But not here, not like this.

The games I played went from interesting to frustrating the moment people started joining and playing Sonic. As if vanilla's horrible balance wasn't bad enough, it's pretty blatant here. Sonic can endlessly spam thoks to run circles around you when he lands a blow, and constantly rain shots upon you left and right while you're still just trying to accelerate back to a descent speed and scramble for your rings. He's become an absolute advantage character over the other two, even more so than poor Tails, as there is no escaping from him.

The one thing that gave you a breather from the spammish onslaught of constant thok-mashing was invincibility, and now that gets impossible to maintain over-time. This isn't your fault though, more so the fault of vanilla's bad decision making. The only way to fix this is by adjusting the stats of all three to be reasonable for this system (make Tails just as fast as Knuckles, and both accelerate significantly faster than Sonic, while sending Sonic's thok down to his runspeed or so).

Aside from that issue, it's a lot more interesting than vanilla's multiplayer yes. I only have a few suggestions, some of which we went over in that netgame:
*Hitting your party-members shouldn't cause them to lose any rings or weapon panels, just get knocked back. Having your rings blocked from going through them, as well as causing the teammate you shot unable to move for a bit (and having the chance of knocking them down high areas) is enough punishment for crowding and ganging up on people.
*Knocking foes into environmental hazards should award you points.
*Getting hit, like SRB2CS, shouldn't drop weapon panels. Only upon death. Dropping them constantly was never a good idea in the first place for me. Why do I lose what I took time to collect to someone who's already pounding on me? It just makes no sense whatsoever, it's annoying. Losing ammo is more than enough.

To be honest, I don't like weapon panels dropping in vanilla SRB2 either.

Sonic is a big problem here (not that he isn't just as big of a problem in vanilla) but I do not want to nerf him in a way that ruins him, but I think I have an idea of how to do that. Something that makes thokking harder, not necessarily worse. Tails and Knuckles buffs are obviously also on the table.

I also want to make the respawn system smarter so rather than spawning randomly, it tries to spawn you away from opponents to address sryder13. I had this happen to me a couple times in a match too.

I played this about ten minutes ago and I have got to say it's the most ridiculous point system ever, it takes way too long to kill people. And having an attraction shield is ridiculously overpowered in this, MORE than vanilla SRB2. The idea is nice, but the fact that you can EASILY pick up one ring and hey presto, you're fine, is irritating. Unless you spray a heap of automatics at the player, they can easily pick up one of their dropped rings, and then escape without a scratch. You don't get any points from it either. Brilliant. Me and this one guy were running around for eight minutes straight trying to actually get points to no avail. And Team hitting screwed me over, what, losing all your rings because of a dick of a team mate, even DYING because of them? No.

While I don't have a GREAT first impression, this could really be developed to be a great modification. But as of now, I find it more fun to play vanilla because you actually GET points there, guarranteed.

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Hai! I use rail rings to prove how cheap and easy they are to use!FUCK RAILS

I was disappointed to find that my "deliberately hurt myself so that I can run over lava in ICZ" strategy didn't work any more. Oh well.
I was gonna play more, but with there being nobody on the public server at the time and me needing to do stuff because finals week, I didn't have time.